Navy officer keelhauled for laptop laxness

A top Navy Officer was hauled before a court martial yesterday after a laptop packed with military secrets was nicked from his car.

Commander Paul Lloyd took the computer without permission from his top-security base in London. The father-of-four then left the machine, floppy disks and documents overnight in the boot of his car which parked outside his flat in north-west London last August.

To his horror, the seadog emerged the next day to find a thief had stolen the lot.

The disks and documents later turned up on nearby Stanmore Common, but the laptop was never traced.

Lloyd, who is in charge of contingency planning for the armed forces and helped plot operations in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, was yesterday given a severe ticking off for the laptop bungle.

The court martial in Portsmouth was told military chiefs were "staggered" when they discovered the officer - who had a previously unblemished record - had breached security rules by leaving the device in the car.

According to today's tabloids, Lloyd admitted he: kept secret documents on the wrong colour-coded disk; failed to disconnect the notebook's hard drive; didn't tell a security officer where he was taking the laptop; and left the kit overnight in an unsupervised vehicle.

The 39-year-old was warned by court martial president Commodore Julian Bradshaw: "Your error cannot be overlooked, you will be severely reprimanded."

The computer cock-up is just one of many bungles concerning secret data going walk-about on official's laptops. Earlier this year bungles from MI5 and MI6 agents resulted in highly-sensitive information going missing - on one occasion this followed a drunken binge in a London tapas bar. ®